


In the Stillness

by elesssar



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Brotherly Love, Friendship, Gen, Laketown, Missing Scene, i suck at thinking of tags, the calm before the storm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 07:59:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1811092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elesssar/pseuds/elesssar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fíli and Tauriel talk in a moment of peace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Stillness

Fíli reaches forward, and brushes a strand of hair off of his brother's damp forehead.

Opposite him Tauriel is arranging herbs in a bowl.

“He’s so still,” Fíli says to himself, but Tauriel hears him. The elf looks up, and smiles reassuringly.

“He will recover,” she says, “he is strong.”

“I know,” Fíli says, looking back down at his brother. The presence of this elf makes him uncomfortable, but he can’t bring himself to resent her, not when she has saved his brother. “He’s always been too strong for his own good.”

“How so?” Tauriel murmurs. Fíli watches her with a beady eye as she tentatively leans forward, brushing her fingertips against Kíli’s lightly furled palm.

“He can survive anything – and he has.”

“Tell me about him,” Tauriel says, still tracing a pattern onto his brother’s hand. Fíli looks at her appraisingly. There’s no harm, he decides, and so he does.

“We were travelling back from Ered Luin once, and we stopped at an old house to stay the night. It was empty, we thought it would be safe. In the early hours of the morning orcs attacked. Kíli and I were separated... when all the other orcs were dead, I heard the sounds of a fight from the kitchen. When I ran in, I saw Kíli’s thigh – this one, not his right one – was broken, and he had a gash all up his right side, just here,” Fíli leans across his brother and runs a hand, several inches away from touching, across the line where he knows a faint scar still marks his brothers skin, “and he was still trying to fight. He was slumped against the wall with his sword in front of him and all he could do was parry, but he was _still_ fighting. I threw a dagger from the doorway and hit the orc in the eye. Kíli turned around and glared at me and says ‘I had him beat!’.” Fíli smiles to remember. At the time, he’d been horrified – it’s a brother’s prerogative really, to feel every injury as if it were your own – but Kíli’s stubborn strength has never ceased to amaze.

“I always wondered what it would be like.” Tauriel says quietly, her solid gaze drifting from Fíli’s face back down to Kíli, lingering upon his features.

“What, breaking a leg?” Fíli scoffs.

“Having family.”

Fíli is thrown. It has never occurred to him until now that anyone might not have a family, might not have a network of people that love each other but kind of hate each other at the same time. Fíli has a sneaking suspicion that elves can read minds, because Tauriel says

“Elves are solitary creatures, family I think perhaps doesn’t mean so much to us as it does to you dwarves. If I had family, I never knew them. Thranduil and Legolas are probably as close as I have to a family, and they are not... not quite.”

As Tauriel speaks, she seems to shrink. She is less of a mystical forest creature now and is in fact a small, sad mortal who Fíli can’t help but feel the stirrings of sympathy for.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like not having family,” Fíli says honestly.

Behind them, Sigrid puts away the last plate and moves towards her sister, kneeling down and kissing her on the cheek. There is such affection, such gentleness in her gesture. Fíli and Tauriel both watch the interaction, and Tauriel is smiling slightly with an unreadable expression on her face.

“Kíli told me of a promise he made his mother – your mother – that he would return,” Tauriel says, and Fíli looks around at her sharply, “he showed me the runestone.”

“When was this?”

“In Mirkwood...”

“Of course,” Fíli is not surprised, really, “how typical of my brother to flirt, even in prison.”

“Promises like that are sacred,” Tauriel says, and Fíli can see that she is trying to explain herself – although really he’s unsure just who she is explaining herself too, “I have no family, and I think...I _thought_...that I had to make sure that he kept his promise.”

“By saving his life?”

“Yes,”

“Thank you,” Fíli says sincerely. Kíli stirs slightly, mumbling incoherently.

Tauriel acknowledges his thanks with a slight tilt of her head, and then the two of them turn to the slowly waking Dwarf lying between them.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought of bits of this the other day in the morning when I couldn't be bothered getting out of bed.


End file.
